Adam Weinstein and His Call to Jail Global Warming Skeptics

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

–President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

A young man named Adam Weinstein recently called for incarceration of disbelievers in the cult of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). His argument mirrors the argument Goebbels used in 1930s to quash dissent from eugenics and to take immediate policy actions for the betterment of humanity.

I intend to demonstrate the parallels between the current cult of CAGW, public proponents of aggressive political action in response to their faith in CAGW, and their ideological ancestors of Nazi Germany.

The Holocaust’s American Roots

We can’t talk about Nazi racial policies without talking about the debunked and discredited scientific consensus around eugenics. According to Wikipedia, Eugenics is:

the belief and practice of improving the genetic quality of the human population.[2][3] It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive eugenics), and reduced reproduction of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics).

When we think of racial crimes against humanity, genocide, and holocaust, we think of Nazi Germany. But Hitler and Josef Mengele, the most notorious of Hitler’s scientists, relied on the American Eugenics Movement for inspiration, ideas, and legitimacy. Why not? Look at the pantheon of American political, business, and social leaders and institutions who supported eugenics:

Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States

Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood

Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States

H.G. Wells, Author

Alexander Graham Bell, Scientist

Hermann Joseph Muller, Nobel Laureate

Robert Andrews Millikan, Nobel Laureate

David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University

The Carnegie Institution

Harriman Railroad Corporation

The Rockefeller Foundation

Not to mention prominent British thinkers:

John Meynard Keynes

George Bernard Shaw

What might eugenics look like in practice? We don’t have to guess. From the same Wikipedia article:

American William Goodell (lived from 1829 to 1894) advocated castration and spaying of the insane.[6] Mortality rates from “Battey’s operation”, the surgical removal of healthy ovaries, was as high as one in five deaths at the time, but the surgery kept being performed.[7]

Francis Galton, a distant relative of Charles Darwin, founded eugenics in the 1860s, but eugenics floundered until picked up and dusted off by American academics and politicians in the 1900s. Stanford president David Starr Jordan turned on the whole academic, progressive, do-gooder world with his 1902 article, Race of a Nation.

Most states in the US passed eugenics laws beginning in the 1920s. In a famous eugenics Supreme Court case, Beck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defended the practice by writing:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Imbeciles of the world, UNITE!

Today, CAGW skeptics find difficulty getting published or winning faculty seats in universities. Likewise, scholars who opposed or questioned eugenics were shunned in the 1920s and 1930s. America’s major universities, its most respected business leaders and institutions, its dominant politicians, its newspaper editors, and its state legislators considered anti-eugenicists crackpots—possibly the sort of feeble-minded imbeciles the enlightened progressives were trying to exterminate. Speaking out against eugenics was tantamount to volunteering as subjects for scientific human experimentation. As Hans Schantz writes on the technology blog AetherCzar:

Eugenics supporters advocated immediate and sweeping actions to keep society from being overwhelmed by the higher birth rate of social undesirables. More than thirty states in the U.S. had compulsory sterilization for certain individuals aimed at keeping undesirables like mental patients, “imbeciles,” and criminals from polluting the genetic pool. [emphasis added]

There was no to time to waste! The science of the day was overwhelming and clear. Anyone who opposed eugenics was opposed to civil society and, thus, an existential threat to humanity. To the planet! To God and His angels in Heaven.

“Kill the heathens!”

Think American ingenuity would stand by while Hitler showed the world how to identify and round up undesirables? Think again, you doubter of American Excellence:

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization. [source]

Somehow, the Hennessys slipped that noose, escaping to the yay-hoo world of Middle America where highfalutin ideas like eugenics hadn’t yet arrived. (Washington University was, after all, was only 50 years old when the Harrimans were rounding up the Hennessys and Harrigans in New York City.)

At the First National Conference on Race Betterment, University of Wisconsin eugenicist Leon J. Cole lectured on the “dysgenic” effects of charity and medicine on eugenic progress. He made a clear distinction between Darwin’s concept of natural selection and the newer idea of simple “selection.” The difference, Cole explained, “is that instead of being natural selection it is now conscious selection on the part of the breeder.…Death is the normal process of elimination in the social organism, and we might carry the figure a step further and say that in prolonging the lives of defectives we are tampering with the functioning of the social kidneys!”

While American eugenicists sorted out the thorny issue of whether to get on with killing the unwanted or if regular beatings would suffice, the American movement developed a big fan across the Atlantic. New York Times best-selling author, Edwin Black, describes the fan mail a young Austrian sent to two prominent American eugenicists:

America had established the value of race and blood. In Germany, the concept was known as Rasse und Blut. Yet the catch phrase was developed by David Starr Jordan, the racist president of Stanford University. U.S. proposals, laws, eugenic investigations and ideology were not undertaken quietly out of sight of German activists. They became inspirational blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers, be they white-coated doctors studying Eugenical News and attending congresses in New York, or brown-shirted agitators waving banners and screaming for social upheaval in the streets of Munich.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. He was an extreme nationalist who also considered himself a race biologist and an advocate of a master race. He was willing to use force to achieve his nationalist racial goals. His inner circle included Germany’s most prominent eugenic publisher. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While in prison, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American raceological stalwarts. Moreover, he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its corruption by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them a fan letter.

In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant wrote: “Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

One day in the early 1930s, AES president Whitney visited the home of Grant, who was at the time chairing a eugenic immigration committee. Whitney wanted to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter stated that Grant’s book was “his Bible.”

The man writing both letters to the American eugenic leaders would soon burn and gas his name into the blackest corner of history. He would duplicate the American eugenic program—both that which was legislated and that which was only brashly advocated—and his group would consistently point to the United States as setting the precedents for Germany’s actions. And then this man would go further than any American eugenicist ever dreamed, further than the world would ever tolerate, further than humanity will ever forget.

The man who sent those fan letters to America was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s infatuation with American science was a mutual admiration society. By 1935, American eugenics found its perfect, if lethal, advocate.

The Scientific Consensus of 1935

Scientific consensus is nothing new. Numerous hypotheses have earned a consensus of interested scientists. Usually, consensus involves data-driven hypotheses of large systems that are not easily subjected to laboratory tests.

Six scientific consensuses you’ve learned about, all which were dead wrong or dramatically overstated by breathless, emotionally blinded advocates. All lies or errors backed, not by some mob of Walmart shoppers, but by United States Surgeons General, television doctors, and leading climate scientists. Just as eugenics was once the scientific consensus accepted without question by Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, John Maynard Keynes, the faculty of Harvard, and the president of Stanford University, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is, today, accepted without question by Al Gore, Barack Obama, the faculty of Harvard University, and the president of Stanford. And many more.No, they weren’t blithering idiots. And they didn’t seek to do evil. They were blinded by cognitive biases and faulty heuristics into accepting as truth a flawed prescription for the betterment of humanity.

In other words, great scientists are just as susceptible to falling in love with an error as is the average Walmart shopper.

So go ahead and spray some CFC-infused saccharin sweetener on your whole egg cheese omelet while basking in the glow of your coal furnace. Just don’t let the miseducated paragons of climate and health virtue catch you, or you’ll be fed to Clarence Campbell’s lethal chamber. (Burning human flesh is, no doubt, a form of renewable green energy eligible for tax deductions.)

But enough of our modern pseudo-plagues.

In the early 20th century, population and social problems dominated studies of human conditions and societal extinction, much as CAGW dominates today. As with CAGW, scientists interested in these human problems reached a consensus on the cause and final solution to problems of population, poverty, inherited disease, racial capacities, crime, and feeblemindedness. The scientific and political consensus was called eugenics:

At the peak of its popularity, eugenics was a widely held scientific consensus with broad social support. It reinforced existing prejudices and racism. More competent and rigorous analysis has shown the sweeping claims of eugenics to be grossly overstated, if not completely wrong. But, eugenics led to the implementation of far-reaching policies and practices that in the fullness of time we have come to deeply regret. [emphasis added]

In the summer of 1934, one and a half years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO), meeting in Zurich, passed a resolution to which Nazi propaganda frequently referred in order to illustrate the international acceptance of their race policies. In this unanimously [consensus!] passed resolution . . . the IFEO state that, despite all differences in political and social outlooks, the organization was “united by the deep conviction that eugenic research and practice is of the highest and most urgent importance for the existence of civilized countries.” It recommended that all governments “make themselves acquainted with the problems of heredity, population studies, and eugenics.” It stated that eugenic principles should be adopted as state policies “for the good for their nations . . . with suitable regional modifications.”

Replace “IFEO” with “IPCC” and “eugenics” with “global warming,” that paragraph might well appear in tomorrow’s Washington Post. Here, I’ll do it for you:

In the summer of 2010, one and a half years after the Obama administration came to power in the United States, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting in Brussels, passed a resolution to which American propaganda frequently referred in order to illustrate the international acceptance of their climate policies. In this unanimously passed resolution . . . the IPCC stated that, despite all differences in political and social outlooks, the organization was “united by the deep conviction that climate change research and practice is of the highest and most urgent importance for the existence of civilized countries.” It recommended that all governments “make themselves acquainted with the problems of greenhouse gasses, global warming studies, and climate regulation.” It stated that climate change principles should be adopted as state policies “for the good for their nations . . . with suitable regional modifications.”

International consensus on bad science finds fertile soil in the minds of madmen. As we saw at the end of the previous section, Adolf Hitler fell in love with the science of eugenics and the political case eugenics provided. Hitler’s dark obsession with Jewish treachery against Germany was mere prejudice in Hitler’s mind—until American scientists armed his mind with scientific proof.

When Hitler seized control of the German government, he made eugenics the official state policy. Racial laws and regulations, academic regulations, racial propaganda, and discrediting of “deniers” were all justified by the scientific consensus that had formed around eugenics and metastasized to every country in the industrial world.

German racial hygienists and Nazi race politicians viewed this resolution as confirmation of German and American dominance in the eugenics movement and as international approval of the 1933 German sterilization law. . . . Nazi racial hygienist Heinz Kürten, who led a Committee for the Implementation of the National Revolution with the goal of forcing Jews out of medical positions in Germany, explained that the conference had shown eugenicists from all over the world that the implementation of comprehensive eugenics measures in Nazi Germany represented an important step in global eugenics. [source]

At the next eugenics conference in Germany, the world toasted its new, global, scientific consensus for the preservation of civilized society. Again, from The Nazi Connection:

The 1935 International Congress for Population Science in Berlin marked the apex of international support for Nazi race policies and represented a great success for the Nazi race propaganda machine. This Congress assembled prominent eugenicists, anthropologists, population scientists, and geneticists from all over the world. German racial hygienists constituted the largest group of participants, delivering 59 of the 126 presentations. [source]

How could mere science launch a holocaust? Because the scientists who defended their non-scientific consensus used existential fear-mongering to promote and defend their work. Pro-eugenics scientists, politicians, and philosophers locked themselves into a logic-tight echo chamber and launched the world on the fast track toward the Holocaust.

The Nazis’ Scientific Justification for Eliminating Dissenters

Hitler’s dictatorship, backed by sweeping police powers, silenced critics of Nazi eugenics and supporters of individual rights. After all educational and cultural institutions and the media came under Nazi control, racial eugenics permeated German society and institutions. Jews, considered “alien,” were purged from universities, scientific research institutes, hospitals, and public health care. Persons in high positions who were viewed as politically “unreliable” met a similar fate [source].

Few could argue that Hitler’s purge was anti-scientific. After all, a review of the world’s scientific journals of 1935 showed the overwhelming majority of published studies affirmed the validity of eugenics and the need for society to rid itself of undesirables. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Even though Hitler didn’t need anyone’s permission to silence critics of eugenics, he justified the purge:

Eugenics is the scientific consensus

Eugenics proves that bad breeding weakens the race

Dissenters seek to block implementation of our science-based policies to save the race

Therefore, dissenters are an existential threat to humanity

Who wouldn’t want to silence an existential threat to humanity? To argue against Hitler’s racial purity laws was to argue for human suffering, misery, and eventual extinction. Scientists and profiteers of human suffering are despicable. They should pay for their crimes, and they should not be allowed to pollute the minds of people unfit to form a sound scientific judgment on such complex matters. That’s what we have scientists for, right?

Once a madman’s aims seem justified by a scientific consensus, Katy bar the door.

And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can’t call us “global warming deniers ” because “denier” makes us sound like “Holocaust deniers”, and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do. [emphasis added]

Since I lost many relatives in the Holocaust, I understand all too well the unique nature of that catastrophe. The Holocaust is not an analogue to global warming, which is an utterly different kind of catastrophe, and, obviously, one whose worst impacts are yet to come.

Now, that we understand that CAGW evangelists use the term “denier” with a malicious purpose, we can return to our friend Adam Weinstein. And thank him for opening our eyes. My eyes, at least.

Until I read his Gawker rant, I laughed off the idea of jailing CAGW “deniers.” I’d scanned the stories about some third-rate philosophy professor wanting to round up “deniers” into concentration or re-education camps or whatever. I might even have tweeted to a link to one of these stories, but I didn’t take it seriously. Too often, political activists on all sides promote crackpot ideas by venting their outrage at an opponent’s idiotic ideas. I’m guilty, but I’m trying to reform.

I began reading Adam Weinstein’s article on my iPhone as the automated car wash whirred and hissed around me. Nothing like white noise of a car wash to kick off some premium lateral thinking. I can’t tell you exactly which sentence or paragraph released the memory in mind, but somewhere early—somewhere between Applying Pre-soak and Power Wash and long before Clear Coat Enhancer—Mr. Weinstein’s logic for jailing CAGW skeptics took on an eerie German accent. Perhaps it was his opening syllogism.

Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars [source].

As syllogisms go, Weinstein’s is pretty weak. He probably didn’t mean to form a syllogism, as the Nazi propagandists did in the 1930s. But it was a syllogism, nonetheless. The rest of Weinstein’s argument builds on this initial logic: a) CAGW is undeniable and b) CAGW kills people and c) knowingly making statements that get people killed is a crime, therefore d) we must rid society of those who get people killed by denying CAGW.

Like the Nazi’s syllogism, the CAGW syllogism relies on your accepting the premises. Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Cohen accept as established that a) human activity is the primary cause of climate change over the past century and b) continued human-caused climate change will be catastrophic. But anyone with even scant knowledge of science knows that neither a) nor b) can be proven. Statistics 101 teaches that causation cannot be determined by analysis alone. Causation requires a controlled experiment in which the investigator controls all the independent variables. Obviously, no one can control — or even reasonable catalog — all of the variables affecting earth’s climate. No responsible person even claims to know how to weigh the variables we suspect contribute to climate. And no climate model has ever reliably predicted future climate changes.

What Mr. Weinstein advocates, though, is not a closer examination of the science he believes. To the contrary, Mr. Weinstein hopes to use the criminal justice system to prevent further inquiry. Mr. Weinstein believes it’s time to do what the Nazi’s did to eugenics “deniers.”

Let’s pretend Mr. Weinstein’s hopes come to fruition and look backward. In this scenario, a passaged quoted earlier in this post might be edited and reused:

Weinstein’s dictatorship, backed by sweeping police powers, silenced critics of American climate policy and supporters of individual rights. After all educational and cultural institutions and the media came under Weinstein’s control, CAGW permeated American society and institutions. Skeptics, considered “deniers,” were purged from universities, scientific research institutes, hospitals, and public health care. Persons in high positions who were viewed as politically “unreliable” met a similar fate [source]

Both eugenicists in Nazi Germany and CAGW alarmists today demand an end to inquiry and questioning of their beloved scientific consensuses.

Germany of the 1930s accepted that eugenics was settled science and complied. Many, if not most, Germans helped tamp down what they believed to be dangerous deviations from the accepted principles. Dissenters were arrested, or worse.

Now, Mr. Weinstein, an associate professor of philosophy, and others want the United States to follow Nazi Germany’s prescription for precisely the same disease: an existential threat to society and to the human race.

Weinstein isn’t kidding. Neither was Goebbels. So what would Fuhrer Weinstein do?

CAGW Proponents Final Solution to the CAGW Denier Question

Earlier, we saw the list of remedies for the problem of undesirables propounded by Harry Laughlin in1914. Those remedies included forced sterilization, post partem murder of deformed or potentially deformed children, state laws controlling who may marry whom, and even euthanasia of undesirables.

When Hitler enacted his racial policies in Germany, American eugenicists–the Michael Manns of their day and cause–rejoiced.

“You will be interested to know,” Goethe’s letter proclaimed, “that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the intellectuals behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation.

Human betterment, indeed.

Again, consider that eugenicists dominated scientific journals of the 1930s, just as CAGW believers dominate today’s. The precepts of eugenics convinced the US Supreme Court and many inferior courts, not to mention over 30 state legislatures. In 1935, eugenics was as accepted as man-made climate change is today. Advocates of eugenics policies believed that the human race was doomed unless their policies became law. They saw their battle for centralized breeding and culling of the human race as a life or death struggle. Their science was every bit as sound as Michael Mann’s. And their supporters were every bit as serious about quashing dissent as Adam Weinstein.

So what are Mr. Weinstein’s suggested remedies for the final solution to the climate change question? I’ll let him answer:

I’m talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I’m talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.

Those malcontents must be punished and stopped. [emphasis added]

But how? Under what laws would we round up and punish the “deniers?”

Under the same laws Italian courts used to punish six scientists who failed to warn the public about an earthquake before it happened!

The scientists weren’t convicted because they failed to predict an earthquake; no one can make such a prediction with reliable precision. But they were convened to study a series of tremors the week before the quake, and tacitly signed off on a government official’s public message that “the situation looks favorable” and residents should chill out with some wine.

Please don’t miss Mr. Weinstein’s implication here. Scientists should not form independent judgments based on the information available. Instead, in Mr. Weinstein’s world, scientists must conclude what he wishes them to conclude. The Italian scientists should not have used their own best judgment, but the judgment Weinstein and some associate professor of philosophy advanced–in hindsight.

To his credit–or perhaps as evidence of his disregard for individuals–Mr. Weinstein is not yet ready to round up the masses:

Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

So us Walmart shoppers are safe. For now. Until we demand that Mr. Limbaugh be released from his prison cell.

At the start of the eugenics movement’s push toward the Holocaust, the Weinsteins of the time were more accommodating, too. Laughlin would let those who survived birth live in peace–so long as peace excluded having a family. Three generations of imbeciles are enough, after all.

As we’ve seen, though, activists who believe their cause is a life or death for the human race rarely settle for silencing critics and expunging universities of skeptical professors. At some point, the risk to humanity becomes too great to tolerate even the F-150 drivers and Mr. Pibb belchers. At some point, the Weinsteins of the world reluctantly call for lethal chambers to humanely free society of its existential threat.

From rounding up dissident scientists and pundits, it’s short ride to the concentration camps.

Conclusion

I am sure Adam Weinstein is a fine gentleman. I’m sure he’ll be offended by my comparing his call for silencing CAGW skeptics to the Nazis silencing eugenics skeptics. He might even be offended by the comparison between himself and American eugenicists of the 20th century.

Look, I’m not calling Weinstein a Nazi. I’m calling him a coward. An intellectual coward. A defender of a faith so fragile that challenges must be put down with weapons, handcuffs, and internment camps.

Mr. Weinstein wants a dictator to protect his beliefs from challenges. He wants protection from ideas and words he doesn’t like. He’s asking you, my brothers and sisters, to surrender your free thought and free speech to some all-knowing, all-seeing mastermind. He’s asking for a dictatorship of scientists he believes.

Mr. Weinstein is not a scientist. He believes scientists he chooses to believe. He has that right. For now.

Under his own rules, he would be subject to arrest were the scientific consensus on global warming to shift, as it did with eugenics. Under Weinstein’s plan for thought-purity, dissenters go to jail. Is Mr. Weinstein prepared to go to jail for his climate beliefs?

I am very wary of beliefs that cannot be questioned. History shows that beliefs protected from examination are not protected because they are strong, but because they are weak. Too weak to withstand even mild scrutiny.

Refusing to consider the possibility that they might be wrong leads men to horrible crimes. Hitler, Goebbels, Laughlin, Campbell, Goethe, and all the other eugenicists were as certain of their faith in the science of eugenics as Mr. Weinstein is certain of his faith in man-made global warming. Eugenicists were so convinced of their beliefs that they stopped questioning themselves and prohibited others from questioning, too.

I don’t think Weinstein is evil. I do think he has opened the door and invited the devil in for a cold beer and pizza. Adam Weinstein is the kind of man who never questions his own convictions. Neither did Hitler. Nor does Michael Mann.